Mapping Power: How the "Network State" ER Diagram Reveals the New Tech-Political Nexus
- Steffen Konrath
- 7 days ago
- 3 min read
In the past year, we’ve been building something unusual: a dynamic Entity-Relationship (ER) diagram that maps the evolving world of "The Network State," the loose, often opaque ecosystem of tech founders, investors, intellectual movements, ideological currents, and state power structures that increasingly shape our political and economic realities.
The diagram does not aim to depict a single conspiracy or a neatly coordinated plan. Rather, it visualizes a fluid, fast-changing network of relationships, financial, ideological, organizational, through which powerful actors pursue their visions of the future. It makes visible what is often hidden: how ideas travel between Silicon Valley and Washington, between think tanks and startup boards, between esoteric blogs and executive orders.
Each update adds new layers of complexity and texture to this map. The latest addition, drawn from a detailed investigative video about Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir, offers a striking example of why this kind of diagram is valuable.
Surveillance and Power: The Alex Karp Update
Alex Karp is a technologist and philosopher turned surveillance baron. His company, Palantir, was born from close relationships with U.S. intelligence agencies and has since become one of the most influential — and controversial — nodes in the global surveillance architecture.
The new data we integrated traces Karp’s network of relationships: his founding of Caydman Group, his deep links to the CIA, NSA, FBI, ICE, and the Israeli Defense Forces, and Palantir’s role in providing controversial predictive policing tools and enabling military AI projects like Project Lavender in Gaza. It also surfaces Palantir’s documented involvement with Cambridge Analytica, which weaponized social media data for political manipulation.
Karp’s personal story, as revealed in the source material, is a telling case of how individual psychology, in this case, Karp’s well-documented paranoia and obsession with control, can shape the trajectory of a company that now provides critical infrastructure for state surveillance and military targeting. And that, in turn, helps shape the Network State ecosystem itself.
The Network State: Why an ER Diagram?
I used an ER diagram to track developments, structures, and ties, because the "Network State" is not primarily a hierarchy. It is a network of people and entities linked by capital, ideas, and relationships of influence.
It is decentralized in structure but often centralizing in effect: private actors increasingly shape public life, and ideological entrepreneurs invent new justifications for private governance, surveillance, and political control.
The diagram helps us:
Visualize clusters: e.g., how Peter Thiel’s financial and ideological reach connects multiple network state projects, Palantir, and Trump-era policymaking;
Trace the movement of ideas: from Curtis Yarvin’s “Dark Enlightenment” to DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency;
Understand flows of capital and legitimacy: e.g., how a16z’s American Dynamism platform launders state-aligned techno-nationalism as libertarian innovation;
Spot contradictions and tensions, such as Alex Karp’s progressive self-image versus Palantir’s deep entanglement with ICE deportations and military targeting.
In short, it helps us build a memory of a highly fluid, media-savvy, sometimes deliberately obfuscated movement — so we can understand how today’s emerging post-liberal political economy is being constructed.
Why does this matter? - The Economic and Political Stakes
The answer can be short: Because these relationships are reshaping real markets and real governance.
As more public functions are privatized, from policing to immigration enforcement to education to military targeting, new forms of profit extraction and ideological capture emerge. The Network State is not just about cloud nations and opt-in citizenship. It is about the privatization of sovereignty and new models of inequality, surveillance, and political unaccountability.
Venture-backed startups and billionaires now increasingly drive what were once state-only functions. A company like Palantir profits from the machinery of deportation and war while selling an image of technological liberation.
An investor like Peter Thiel can fund radical intellectual movements while simultaneously advising U.S. policy. Think tanks like the Heritage Foundation can shape the ideological narrative legitimizing these transformations.
Mapping this ecosystem makes these dynamics legible. It helps journalists, policymakers, researchers, and citizens see where the real levers of power are moving, and who is pulling them.
The ER diagram will never be complete, instead it is work-in-progress.
As a living project, it offers a crucial tool for understanding how a new synthesis of tech, capital, and authoritarian governance is built, one that may define the political economy of the coming decades.
